Clegg's reformism might ruin Britain

AmotzAsa-El

Columnist

JERUSALEM (MarketWatch) -- Democracy, Churchill said, is the worst form of government except for all the others. One could add to this that within democracy, the worst system is the one that Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg now demands that Britain adopt.

"Our electoral system is broken," quipped the visibly dispirited Clegg as the results emerged. Yes, one cannot dismiss his conclusion as mere sour grapes, considering that his party's 23% share of the popular vote won it a mere 9% of seats in parliament while Labor's 29% handed it 40%.

The problem is that for Britain's already ailing economy, Clegg's reform is about as welcome as a diet of cheeseburgers, fries and sundaes is to a heart patient.

As a theory, the debate between Clegg and the Tories dates back to the 19th century, when philosopher John Stuart Mill backed the proportionate idea.

He argued that it would enable every minority to be represented and let legislators represent only those who voted for them, instead of making losers go home and winners represent everyone in their districts, including those who voted for their opponents.

Walter Bagehot, founder of the Economist, challenged Mill. A proportionate system, he said, would attract mainly hacks, foster "party violence" and discourage the kind of moderation that parliaments should be encouraged to cultivate.

Subsequent experience has vindicated Bagehot. Israel, the only sizable democracy in the world with a purely proportionate system (the other two are Iceland and Slovenia), has paid dearly for a system whose political damage has been, and remains, immeasurable.

Israelis vote for parties rather than for individual legislators. That means marginal groups can enter parliament easily, as they indeed have done repeatedly, adding up votes from anywhere around the country.

Such small parties not only splinter the legislature -- no Israeli party ever won half of the Knesset's seats -- they linchpin coalition governments and then steer the prime minister's wheel in ways that are disagreeable to the majority and detrimental to the economy.

They do that because the system allows them to prefer partisan causes over the national interest. That is how, for instance, Israel's ultra-Orthodox religious parties consistently obtain for their voters exemptions from military service as well as subsidized housing and tuition. They also are allocated billions of dollars annually for their isolationist school system, which often challenges the state's authority.

The fragmentation caused by the proportionate system has led to absurdities.

In one case, half a faction defected from right to left in return for a seat in the prime minister's inner security cabinet for its leader -- who later did time for smuggling ecstasy.

In another election, a little-known retired Mossad spy's hastily improvised party won 5% of the electorate. He did so thanks to the votes of thousands of youngsters who thought they were cracking a great joke by voting for a party that no one knew anything about, other than that it championed the retiree population. Several weeks later that party's anonymous No. 2 candidate became minister of health.

Since the proportionate system makes a voter choose a party rather than individuals, every Israeli Knesset is filled with dozens of anonymous legislators. These people are handpicked by party leaders and need not personally confront the voters in districts and win them over.

That goes not only for the ultra-Orthodox parties but also for secular factions like Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman's Israel Is Our Home Party, whose choice in 2007 for tourism minister had to resign hours before taking her seat at the cabinet table, after the media learned that she had never earned the MBA and accounting degrees she claimed to possess.

All these pale compared with the proportionate system's worst damage, which is the radicalization of policy.

Israel's great economic turning point, the 1985 austerity plan, had been agreeable to most voters for years -- but it still had to wait until inflation climbed to 415% because most lawmakers had no reason to suspect they would be held personally accountable for the crisis.

That would have been different had legislators answered directly to the public, as district representatives do, rather than to party forums and bosses, as Israeli lawmakers do.

As Bagehot argued, the need to be elected by an entire district makes politicians shun the extremes and remain generally within what we today call the center-right and center-left. That does wonders for fostering a balance between flexibility and stability.

Israel's lack of such a system also exposed the large parties to the pressures of extremist groups from right and left on matters of war and peace, producing successively the sweeping settlement program in the 1980s and the Oslo Accords in the 1990s. Eventually both proved disagreeable to the mainstream electorate.

Such gambles would probably not have passed in a district-based system because most legislators would have focused on their constituents' daily travails, and the voters for their part would have expected their legislators to avoid strategic adventures and diplomatic utopias.

Just how much all this has already cost the Israeli taxpayer no one can calculate, but everyone knows that the consistent payments to small parties in turn for their joining any government is hefty, not to say exorbitant, and come at the expense of the national interest.

That is what the proportionate system does, and no one can get rid of it because the strange bedfellows that thrive on it -- including far-left secularists and ultra-Orthodox rabbis as well as far-right settlers and anti-Zionist Islamists - all unite in their protection of what they sanctify as the ideal of proportionate elections.

Clegg's call

Clegg, it should be stressed, is not demanding for now that Britain adopt Israel's sweeping model of proportionate elections. He is prepared to settle for a format whereby various districts would be combined and within them more than one candidate would be elected.

Well, the British people are hereby warned that even such a modest beginning would ultimately put in parliament the wrong people, some of whom would sooner or later arrive at the cabinet table -- where they will in due course cost Britain even more money that it does not have.

Britain's economic crisis needs no elaboration, and its cure - harsh fiscal surgery - requires no research. Rather, it begs strong government, the very sort that proportionate elections and the coalition regime it will surely produce can be counted on to obstruct.

If even just momentarily or slightly heeded, Clegg's reform will result in increased pressure from parliament to expand spending. Consequently, the pound will march south, taking with it first the British economy, and then Britain itself.

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